With admission deadlines fast approaching, and young middle class parents across Tamil Nadu preparing to line up in serpentine queues for application forms to admit their wards into the lower kindergarten (LKG) classes of the state’s 5,934 matriculation schools, a November 11 circular issued by the Directorate of Matriculation Schools has created consternation and added to the sum of their fears.

According to the circular, matriculation schools should restrict LKG admissions to 30 per class, as per provisions of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and Code of Regulations for Matriculation Schools. And to curb the practice of dividing each class into several sections — A, B, C, D etc — it has imposed a ceiling of four sections per class (120 students). Special permission is required for a matriculation board-affiliated school to add a fifth section to admit up to 150 students in LKG. As per provisions of the RTE Act, the teacher-pupil ratio per section is 1:30 for primary and 1:35 for upper primary classes. Schools affiliated with the Delhi-based CBSE and CISCE examination boards do not fall within the purview of the Directorate of Matriculation Schools.

The directorate’s decision to strictly enforce this rule from the coming academic year has reportedly also been prompted by repeated directions from the courts to education department officials to limit the number of students per school as per the Code of Matriculation Schools, 1990 to ensure children’s safety and better quality education.

The circular has come as a bolt from the blue to 400 large matriculation schools in Tamil Nadu which have over 10-14 sections per class and several small schools that have over five sections all the way up from LKG. “We are willing to comply with the teacher-pupil ratio fixed by the directorate but it will be difficult to cut down the number of sections in LKG to four or five as we have already created capacity. State government officials should inspect our infrastructure and check whether safety norms have been complied with before asking all of us to cut down the number of sections at entry level. If I am forced to implement this rule, I will have to start another school from scratch to satisfy the hugedemand for LKG admissions,” says the correspondent (spokesperson) of a large school with 10 sections per class, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Although educationists and teachers agree that smaller schools are safer and easier to manage, they are quick to point out that the directorate’s new admission norms could create a shortage of 100,000 LKG seats in 2014-15 and render hundreds of teachers jobless. Parents dread the prospect of a mad scramble for LKG admissions in matriculation schools. “Even with so many sections per LKG class, it’s difficult to secure admission into reputed neighbourhood schools. The cap on the number of LKG sections will force us to commute tiny tots to distant preschools offering questionable quality education. We don’t have any objection to large schools even if they charge high fees as most of them have excellent infrastructure and safety measures. These are private unaided schools. The government should leave them alone,” says S. Selvakumar, parent of two LKG children studying in SBOA Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Chennai.

This argument doesn’t impress state education department officials who have turned down pleas of large matriculation schools — some with 10 sections per class. Therefore some schools have decided to move the courts challenging the four-section cap as the government’s strategy to force children into the state’s poor quality government and aided schools which are experiencing a steady flight of students. This is confirmed by Pratham’s ASER 2012 survey which says that enrollments in Tamil Nadu’s private primaries have risen from 15.7 percent of all admissions in 2007 to 30.2 percent in 2012.

Private school managements in Tamil Nadu are specially indignant that instead of attending to its own 53,000 owned and aided schools, the overwhelming majority of whom are RTE non-compliant, the state government has drawn up elaborate rules and regulations for the state’s 5,934 relatively far superior matriculation schools. “Thousands of government schools are non-compliant with the RTE Act and function with just one or two teachers in dilapidated buildings without compound walls, drinking water and toilet facilities. They, rather than private unaided schools need the state government’s urgent attention,” says K.R. Nandhakumar, state general secretary, Tamil Nadu Nursery, Primary, Matriculation and Higher Secondary Schools Association.

But that’s a hard mountain to climb. Easier to target private schools.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)